Why go out?

It's hard to avoid a life of television addiction when you work in a place that has rolling news onscreen every minute of your working day (except when the cricket's on, of course). Still it led to one exciting day for me, the day when the failed bombers of July 21 were rounded up after the police laid siege.

"Look!" I was shouting "That's right near where I grew up! That chip shop's terrible. Oooh, I used to walk down there on my way to school! The camera's just panned past my friend Mandy's house. She was my best mate in Class 5... That's where they filmed the Bill, and..."

Still, that seems to be the main point of programmes like MacIntyre's Toughest Towns (Five, 11.05pm), to either persuade you never to travel beyond the end of your street, or, if he happens to be on your street, to scare you pooless and convince you to travel as far away as possible, as soon as possible, but not to any of the other towns on his list.

Or, if you're me, to inspire nostalgia ("Oooh, I was nearly beaten up there too!"). But unless you're particularly keen on never wanting to leave the house again, there's plenty more to chose from in our picks of the night's telly, taken from this week's Guide...

Lost 10pm, C4 Like so much genre television, Lost relies on drawing us in so that we ignore its sillier excesses. Which in turn relies on getting the pacing exactly right. So far so good: last week's revelation that the survivors may not be alone on the island came just in time to stop the show getting too formulaic. Another major surprise follows tonight as heavily pregnant Claire's story unfolds. One of the spookiest episodes to date, and thus very spooky indeed.Jonathan Wright

Sexology: Attack Of The Giant Women 11.05pm, C4 C4's "Sexology" series gives every impression of being a return to the channel's founding principles, ie thinly-veiled soft-porn combined with the gentle ridicule of the sexually weird, more or less masquerading as documentary. This episode, which takes its cue as well as its title from the work of Russ Meyer, explores the world of giantessophiles: men who harbour a fetish for extremely large women. There's some flimsy sociological context offered, but not so much that it distracts from the business in hand, ie gawking at some startlingly unembarrassed men, and the women who profit from them.Andrew Mueller

MacIntyre's Toughest Towns 11.05pm, Five Glasgow was once conferred the status of City of Culture, an event marked by Private Eye with a cartoon of a mugging victim declaring "Is this a dagger I see before me?" In the first episode of his naffly titled 10-part series, investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre surveys Glasgow's culture of murder and knife-related violence. Also screened tonight is the second episode, focusing on Liverpool's gangster dealers.David Stubbs

Numb3rs 9pm, ITV3 At last, a crime show for nerds. The USP in this show is that it uses mathematics to solve crime. This is The Adding Detective. A young maths professor helps out the police by using advanced number crunching, chaos theory and the like. Actually most of this is a smokescreen, an easy way out of some complicated plot turns by spewing maths terminology to fog the viewer's brain. They may as well be using witchcraft, considering some of the ludicrous jumps they make. But, despite all this, it actually works. It's certainly entertaining even if it doesn't quite add up and is mostly 8o11ock5.Phelim O'Neill

The Lost Decade: Little Kinsey 10pm, BBC4 In 1949, inspired by the Kinsey sex survey in America, a bunch of UK anthropologists decided to probe the British public about their sex lives. And they were surprisingly forthcoming. This fascinating hour includes snippets of the respondents' actual words and the reminiscences of people who were sexually active in the postwar years. So, quite a lot of wrinkled people telling it like it was about humping. Something that forces you to think of old people doing it shouldn't be good, but it is.Julia Raeside

Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001) 10pm, FilmFour There are few — if any — directors around today as versatile and experimental as Linklater. He can effortlessly flit from the charmingly romantic Before Sunrise to the rowdy family movie School Of Rock to this strange, lucid dream of a movie. What's more, each movie follows its own rules and succeeds on its own terms. With meandering, character-rich, live action shot on video, then animated over using Macs, this is unlike any other movie in looks. Animation has always enjoyed total freedom — albeit in a carefully structured and pre-planned manner. Now Linklater adds the free-form, randomness of live action to it. This is a kind of animation-verite and a great dry run for his forthcoming Philip K Dick movie, A Scanner Darkly.Phelim O'Neill

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There's always Lost, I suppose.

I'm beginning to regret having given up on the series after the fourth episode, now that everyone's saying it's getting good.

So if any powerful TV executives happen to have read this far - and I'm starting to doubt that anyone reads this far - you're very welcome to send me the entire series on DVD if you like. You know, no pressure or anything. I could send them back after I've watched them and everything. If you like, I mean. Actually, while I'm at it, I really like Scrubs. Ta.